“Out of Something Terrible Something New”: Violence, Anxiety, and Change in Nadine Gordimer’s Novels of Transition
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In South Africa today, the violence of the past is an enduring reality of the present. The message of violence and personal traumas variously explored in Nadine Gordimer’s novels of the transitional period still ring true today. Published in the early years of the post-apartheid period, Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me and The House Gun foreground acts of violence and crime as part of the vast picture of changes taking place in South Africa’s progress toward a non-racialized democracy. These transitional novels examine the climate of violence and anxiety and link incidents of violent crime to the collective guilt of past oppression. They ask the question, "What happens when your own history comes back to haunt you, when the structures you have put in place for your own protection are shown to be the source of your own destruction?" (Kossew 157). It is the tyranny of the past come to haunt and confound the present as it tries to move forward. Gordimer’s fiction has always been concerned with the legacy of old structures, but it has also strived to offer the possibility of relevance for white citizenship in South Africa’s history. This paper examines how None to Accompany Me and The House Gun continue to address the question of possibility of meaningful roles while it examines the power of violence to challenge them. Gordimer’s two novels also creatively re-imagine violence in order to disrupt customary thinking about crime and society to force the acknowledgment of common humanity of blacks and whites and suggest that race does not have to be the primary issue in the future of South Africa. Violent crimes present unwanted pressures on individuals and complicate the healing process, but the novels discussed in the paper suggest possibilities of new arrangements in private lives and in communities and cultures as a way to face the transition to a new history.
Abstract
In South Africa today, the violence of the past is an enduring reality of the present. The message of violence and personal traumas variously explored in Nadine Gordimer’s novels of the transitional period still ring true today. Published in the early years of the post-apartheid period, Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me and The House Gun foreground acts of violence and crime as part of the vast picture of changes taking place in South Africa’s progress toward a non-racialized democracy. These transitional novels examine the climate of violence and anxiety and link incidents of violent crime to the collective guilt of past oppression. They ask the question, "What happens when your own history comes back to haunt you, when the structures you have put in place for your own protection are shown to be the source of your own destruction?" (Kossew 157). It is the tyranny of the past come to haunt and confound the present as it tries to move forward. Gordimer’s fiction has always been concerned with the legacy of old structures, but it has also strived to offer the possibility of relevance for white citizenship in South Africa’s history. This paper examines how None to Accompany Me and The House Gun continue to address the question of possibility of meaningful roles while it examines the power of violence to challenge them. Gordimer’s two novels also creatively re-imagine violence in order to disrupt customary thinking about crime and society to force the acknowledgment of common humanity of blacks and whites and suggest that race does not have to be the primary issue in the future of South Africa. Violent crimes present unwanted pressures on individuals and complicate the healing process, but the novels discussed in the paper suggest possibilities of new arrangements in private lives and in communities and cultures as a way to face the transition to a new history.
참고문헌 (20)
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